Icons of southern religion crafted in clay by Birmingham artist

Michelle Williams/Bimingham NewsNada Boner works on an angel at her studio in the Vestavia Hills Recreation Center, where she teaches weekly clay sculpting classes.

If it's an iconic symbol of traditional Southern religion, Nada Boner has probably sculpted it in clay.

Today at the Bare Hands Gallery in Birmingham, Alabama, she has a new exhibit called "Righteous Roots," featuring 13 of her sculptures including a creek baptism, sacred harp singers, a snake-handling preacher, a foot-washing, decoration day and a woman waving a Jesus fan. She'll also have a wall installation featuring angels and demons.

Details: "Righteous Roots," exhibit of clay sculptures by Nada Boner at the Bare Hands Gallery, on display through Sept. 26.

Hours: The gallery is open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and will be open until 9 p.m. Sept. 11, the first night of the downtown art festival Artwalk.

The sculptures will be on display through Sept. 26. The gallery is open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and will be open until 9 p.m. on Sept. 11, the first night of the downtown art festival Artwalk.

Boner's Southern roots have taken hold over the past 50 years. She was born in Ohio, but moved to Alabama at 13 when her father's traveling sales job brought him to Birmingham.

She avidly pursued art in high school, then got married and started raising children. She has three children and seven grandchildren.

At age 50, she told her husband, Lee Boner, that she planned to stop going to college football games and start doing artwork again.

"I had painted murals, sewed and decorated, I had used my art in my life, but it still wasn't the same as creating something like this," she said, pointing around in her studio at the Vestavia Hills Recreation Center, where she teaches weekly clay sculpting classes.

The tables are filled with clay renderings of angels and human bodies in various arrangements.

"I love the feel of clay," Boner said. "It's warm and yielding. There's something about clay that just lets you dig in. Clay will lean one way or the other. It comes to life. It has so much motion and it's just alive."

Her sculptures of Southern religion seem to be on the verge of life. They seems as if just a little spirit-filled breath would set the arms to waving, the hands to keeping time to shape-note music and the baptismal water to splashing.

"My work is about people and body language, how they speak to each other," Boner said.

She's done numerous Adam and Eve sculptures, one of her favorite subjects, but most people know her for her Nativity scenes. She's sold hundreds of Nativity pieces, mainly through the annual Nativity displays at Highlands United Methodist Church.

Her sculpture "Jesus Fan," with a woman holding a fan with a picture of Jesus on it, is a tribute to the vitality of black evangelical worship in the South.

"They're not scared to show their emotion," she said.

Not like the unemotional frozen chosen that she generally worships with, Boner joked. "I'm Presbyterian," she said. "You don't do anything."

One thing she's learned over the years in religious sculpture is that people don't like angel sculptures that have realistic eyes and expressions. People prefer angels that have vague faces, she said.

"I don't know if it's the mystery, or they just don't want an angel looking at them," Boner said.